Out in the field, a documentarian can point their camera anywhere, but in the darkness of the editing room, the real choices are made that turn that footage into an emotional, coherent and compelling story. That’s why the Film Independent Documentary Story Lab chooses to focus on getting those cuts as sharp as possible and supporting doc directors as they bring the pieces of their film together on the timeline.
Film Independent is proud to announce nine filmmakers selected for its 2026 Documentary Story Lab — a one-week intensive program kicking off May 4.
“This year’s Documentary Story Lab Fellows are engaging with questions of truth, legacy and survival in ways that are both deeply personal and broadly resonant,” said Daniel Cardone, Senior Manager of Documentary Programs & Fiscal Sponsorship at Film Independent. “These projects take on complex, often unresolved subjects—from a decades-long mystery in the American West to environmental injustice and cultural preservation—with a level of depth and access that demands careful, intentional storytelling.”
Fellows will be paired with a talented roster of Editing Mentors, including Alejandro Valdes-Rochin (Maxima), Claire Didier (Enigma), Pablo Proenza (Natchez), Christy Denes ACE (Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal), Veronica Pinkham (Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me), and Inbal B. Lessner ACE (Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult).
Guest speakers and Directing Advisors bring an impressive depth of experience to the program, including composers Gil Talmi and Andrew Gross, distribution specialists Orly Ravid and Annalisa Shoemaker, industry veteran Sarba Das, and Film Independent Fellows Alysa Nahmias (Cookie Queens) and Smriti Mundhra (Indian Matchmaking). Additional Directing Advisors include Michèle Stephenson (Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project), Jeremy Workman (Secret Mall Apartment), and David Osit (Predators).
This year’s Lab also includes the Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation Fellowship — a $10,000 unrestricted cash grant awarded to a Jewish filmmaker participating in a Film Independent Artist Development Program. The 2026 recipient is fellow Cecilia Brown, who is developing her project A Bird with a Knife.
The Documentary Story Lab has an impressive alumni list. Notable projects that have come through the program include Daniel Lombroso’s Manhood (SXSW 2026), Suzannah Herbert’s Natchez (Tribeca 2025, Winner Best Documentary), and Harvest (Tribeca 2026), directed by Natalie Baszile and Hyacinth Parker.
Film Independent’s broader documentary programs have also supported Academy Award-nominated films Ascension (Jessica Kingdon) and Minding the Gap (Bing Liu and Diane Quon) — the latter also a Film Independent Spirit Award winner — along with work from Academy Award winner Shane Boris (Navalny), Academy Award nominee Sara Dosa (Fire of Love), and Emmy Award winner Lana Wilson (Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby).
The Documentary Story Lab is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The 2026 Documentary Story Lab projects and Fellows are:
Cecilia Brown
Cecilia Brown is a documentary director, editor and producer based in Portland, OR, and co-founder of Sideyard Studios. Brown’s directing and producing credits include award-winning shorts Oh Whale (2025, Producer), and Strong Grandma (2024, Co-director & Editor, New Yorker Magazine). She has edited multiple documentary shorts including Swept (2025 Emmy Nominee for Best Short Documentary), Teddy (2025), and Walking Two Worlds (Tribeca, 2022). Brown’s work has been supported by The Catapult Development Fund and SF MOMA, and published by HBO, The New Yorker, This American Life, Arc’teryx and The North Face, among others. She has also been awarded ‘Best Oregon Filmmaker’ by McMinnville Film Festival. Brown has a Master’s in Multimedia Journalism from the University of Oregon.
Winslow Crane-Murdoch
Winslow Crane-Murdoch is an award winning director and cinematographer based in Portland, OR, and co-founder of Sideyard Studios. His first documentary feature, The Quiet Epidemic, had its World Premiere at HotDocs 2022, and received a national theatrical release culminating in a screening at Congress. His latest documentary short, Oh Whale (2025), is currently on the festival circuit, winning the jury award for best short documentary at Montclair and New Hampshire film festivals. He co- directed and shot Strong Grandma (2024) which screened at the Paris Olympics and was acquired by The New Yorker Magazine. Crane-Murdoch’s work has appeared on HBO, TIME Magazine, Outside TV, the San Francisco MOMA, and has been supported by the Catapult Film Fund.
A Bird with a Knife
Logline: A Bird with a Knife explores the 50-year mystery surrounding thousands of cattle mutilations across the American West. Following a veteran investigator, an Oregon sheriff and the ranchers whose cases they’re working to solve, this film is about folklore, faith and the stories we tell when no absolute truth exists.
Èlia Gasull Balada
Èlia Gasull Balada is a NAACP Image Award-nominated visual artist and filmmaker. In 2021, she was listed in the DOC NYC 40 under 40 list, and in 2023 she was selected to be part of the Berlinale Talents. She has extensively worked as an editor and writer for documentaries and narrative films. Her most recent credits include The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Tribeca 2022), which won a Peabody Award and a Gracie Award, and received a Television Academy Honor. The Emmy and Peabody nominee The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show (Tribeca 2021) and the Emmy and Grammy nominee The King (Cannes 2017). On the narrative side, she edited Son of Monarchs, winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. For the past six years, Gasull Balada has been working on a mixed media installation that honors a group of Indigenous women from the Peruvian Amazon who suffered the trauma of forced sterilization at the hands of President Alberto Fujimori’s government between 1995 and 2000 — and their agency as artists and activists today. The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs is her directorial debut.
The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs
Logline: After a lifetime of hardship, 75-year-old Indigenous artist Sara Flores emerges from the Peruvian Amazon into the global contemporary art scene. As she confronts the emotional and physical toll that comes with being in the spotlight, she defies the lure of material wealth and transforms her art and legacy into a force for the territorial and cultural resistance of the Shipibo Nation.
Alex J. Bledsoe
Alex J. Bledsoe is a filmmaker whose work illuminates daily life on the frontlines of racial capitalism, and the portals we create for our physical and psychospiritual liberation. Oaklead, her debut feature documentary, follows Oakland community members as they fight to protect one another from lead poisoning in their own homes and schools – and uncover a century of environmental racism. Oaklead is a grantee of Sundance, Berkeley Film Foundation, Redford Center, Fund for Investigative Journalism, Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, a BAVC MediaMaker, and Cucalorus/Working Films/Documentary Accountability Working Group Works-in-Progress Lab Fellow, and California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow.
Bledsoe produced the scripted feature film, Residue, about gentrification in Washington, D.C., which streamed on Netflix after screening at Venice International Film Festival and being distributed by Ava Duvernay’s Array. Residue won the John Cassavetes Award and was nominated for Best Editing at the 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards. Bledsoe is the co-founder of Breaktide, the all women-of-color-owned film production company. She has been a guest columnist for the Washington Post, and a live featured guest on KQED Forum for her filmmaking and activism. Bledsoe earned her B.S. in International Politics from Georgetown University.
Oaklead
Director: Alex J. Bledsoe
Logline: In Oakland, California, we fight to protect our children from lead poisoning in our own homes and schools—and confront over a century of environmental racism. This is the story of the longest ongoing pediatric epidemic in U.S. history.
Katyayani Kumar
Katyayani Kumar is a director, editor, and writer working across documentary and fiction. Kumar is drawn to stories in the margins, where what slips into the shadows of society waits to be rediscovered. A fellow of UnionDocs in New York and incoming editing fellow at the American Film Institute, Kumar was selected by Academy Award–winning producer Guneet Monga to represent India at TIFF as part of the Women in Film delegation. Kumar’s films, including Coffined at Fifteen and Beholder, have screened internationally. Kumar is currently directing Sons of the River, supported by DOC NYC, HotDocs, Film Bazaar, and more.
Sons of the River
Logline: As bodies surface daily in Punjab’s Bhakra Canal, two rivals retrieve the dead from its wake, revealing a life-and-death struggle over power, morality and survival in a society abandoned by the state.
Vanessa Carr
Vanessa Carr is a documentary cinematographer specializing in character-driven vérité. Her work has appeared on HBO, Netflix, and Disney+, and premiered at Sundance, TIFF, SXSW, Tribeca, CPH:DOX and IDFA—and more. Selected credits include Heart of Invictus, Sentient, On Pointe, and Free Money. She shot and co-produced HBO’s Heroin: Cape Cod, USA, nominated for a Cinema Eye Honor. Carr is a DOC NYC 40 Under 40 honoree, LEF/CIFF and BAVC Mediamaker fellow, founding member of the Documentary Cinematographers Alliance, and founder of Doc House. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia.
Josh Gleason
Josh Gleason is a director and producer whose work spans documentary film, television, and radio. His directing credits include The Disrupted (DOK.fest Munich, 2020), distributed by Passion River Films, and True Believer (Ashland Independent Film Festival, 2018). He has directed for Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS series Finding Your Roots, produced for PBS’s Peabody-winning American Experience and Showtime’s Emmy-nominated The Circus. Before working in film, he reported for This American Life and NPR. He is a 2024 LEF/CIFF Fellow, DGA member, and a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.
Untitled Nomads Documentary
Logline: When an American family of five trades their house for an RV, teenage daughter Leilani must come of age on the road. Over six years, her parents’ radical attempt to educate her and her brothers through lived experience reveals the joys and costs of living outside societal norms.
Roni Jo Draper
Roni Jo Draper, PhD (she/they) is an enrolled member of the Yurok tribe. Her experience as a queer, Yurok woman has influenced her writing and work as a teacher, scholar, and artist. Draper produced Scenes From the Glittering World (2021). They also produced, directed, and wrote the short documentary Fire Tender(2023). Draper’s work has been supported by National Geographic, Vision Maker Media, WMM, The Redford Center, Firelight Media, and Sundance Institute.
Marissa Lila Kongao
Marissa Lila Kongao (they/them) is a documentarian and psychedelic healer raised in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. As a director and producer for film and television, their work centers marginalized perspectives who use storytelling to heal. Their work includes co-directing Fire Tender (2023), editing Transmormon (Artistic Vision Award, Big Sky 2014), and producing Scavenger (Big Sky 2013) short documentaries. Kongao also directed and produced a Regional Emmy-winning documentary series in Utah.
We Arrive with Fire / Ne-kah Nuue’m Mehl Mech
Logline: Since time immemorial, Yurok people have placed fire on the land to maintain a balanced ecosystem. In the past century, settlers banned fire, and both the environment and people have suffered. Now, Yurok people are returning fire medicine to heal the land.
For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.
Keep up with Film Independent…
